Visitor Sends Untidy Family Into Shell Shock

January 04, 1988|By Harry Stein, United Feature Syndicate.

The other day, while desperately trying to impose some order on the house before the arrival of the bank inspector from whom we were begging a second mortgage, I came upon a plastic pail full of seashells. Broken seashells. The very seashells, to be precise, that one day last summer my 3-year-old reduced to smithereens with a stone.

I would have chucked them out then if his 6-year-old sister hadn`t stopped me.

``Don`t, Papa,`` she pleaded. ``They`re still good.``

``Still good?`` I plucked from the pail a tiny remnant of what had been a very routine clam shell to begin with. ``What in the world is this good for?`` ``It`s beautiful. It`s my favorite one.``

``All right, all right, you can keep this one. But the rest has to go. It`s junk.``

Tears welled in her eyes. ``It`s not junk. It`s our collection.``

So there, all this time later, elbowing aside my stuff in the hall closet, the pail remained.

Now, at last, was my chance. Furtively, I snatched it up and made for the garbage.

Then I stopped. What if they find out?

Nah, not a chance.

Yeah, but what if they do? What if they need it for some reason? What`ll I say then?

I was standing there, thus engaged, when the doorbell rang.

The bank guy was not, trust me, impressed with what he saw.

The fact that, throughout the inspection, his host carried a child`s pail full of something that smelled even worse than it looked was only part of the problem.

There was also the matter of the mountain of toys, ill-concealed by a pillowcase, in the corner of the master bedroom, and the thousands of works of art everywhere bulging from drawers and cupboards, and the acorns and chestnuts stashed under my son`s bed, and, oh, yeah, the extraordinary array of dead flowers on display on my daughter`s windowsill.

Now, let`s be straight here. Even before the kids came, my wife and I were hardly what you`d call compulsively tidy. We were always pretty casual about discarding newspapers, for instance, or returning empties to the supermarket.

But never had we imagined it would come to this. I mean, by now there are at least a dozen people we`re embarrassed to have over; some of them we`ve been stalling for three years. Six months ago, under deadline on a book review, I could not even locate the book. The truth is, I still haven`t.

Why, the question arises, why do we put up with it? Why, indeed!

Because we remember what happened to our stuff. How many of us are still mourning our discarded collections of matchbooks and bottle caps and butterflies? How many of us are periodically brought close to tears at the very mention of baseball cards? I personally suffered the mysterious disappearance of six shoe-boxes-full, THEIR CONTENTS CLEARLY IDENTIFIED IN MAGIC MARKER! Years later, when it was determined that they had been worth their weight in more than nostalgia, hard questions were asked-but no satisfactory answers ever were forthcoming.

We were, in brief, almost all of us, victims of larger people to whom tidiness meant more than anything.

My wife returned with the kids just as the bank guy was pulling away in his car. ``How`d it go?`` she asked.

``Are you kidding? Look at this place.``

But by then, my daughter had already eased the pail out of my hand. ``See you later,`` she called.